Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Moore introduces 1992 film about Helen M. Luke

"Wisdom consists in doing the next thing that you have to do, doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in it — and the delight is the sense of the sacred." — Helen M. Luke

On Sunday Georgia Aroni, senior member of the Greek Association of Dance Therapists, promotes Helen M. Luke: A Sense of the Sacred with a 2:45 minute video clip on her blog.

According to Amazon.com's description, "The film, introduced by Thomas Moore, includes interviews with Sir Laurens van der Post and Robert Johnson with whom she shared a practice for many years. There is also footage of the Apple Farm Community that she founded. In the film Helen Luke speaks of her life, describes her unusual meeting with Carl Jung and discusses her analysis with Toni Sussman."

For its screening last Friday, Boulder Friends of Jung offers this biography: "Helen M. Luke (1904-1995) was born in England. In midlife, she studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, then moved to the U.S. and established an analytical practice with Robert Johnson in Los Angeles. In 1962, she founded the Apple Farm Community in Three Rivers, Michigan, "a center for people seeking to discover and appropriate the transforming power of symbols in their lives." In her later years, Helen Luke was the model wise woman for many people. Her final book, Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On, a memoir and excerpts from her fifty-four volumes of journals, was published posthumously." Additional Luke materials are linked at Apple Farm Community Writings.

Format: Color, Full Screen, NTSC
VHS Release Date: September 1, 1999
Release Date: June 1, 1992
Run Time: 75 minutes
ASIN: 0930407482

Thomas Moore also writes the Foreword to Luke's book, Old Age: Journey Into Simplicity. In it he shares, "What I treasure about Helen Luke's remarkable book on old age is that she avoids getting caught up in all the usual worries and sentimentalities. She sees age as a mystery and quite rightly hangs all her thoughts about it on images from literature. And not just literature, but some of the most profound of all imaginative writings, which just happen to be personal favorites of mine."

Old Age: Journey into Simplicity
 Helen M. Luke
Paperback: 132 pages
Publisher: Lindisfarne Books (June 1, 2010)
ISBN-10: 1584200790
ISBN-13: 978-1584200796